419 - Where Are You?

Where Are You?
Hugh T. Kerr

Almost hidden in the extensive obituary notices for the late Eugene Carson Blake (d. July 31, 1985) lies a reference that might seem insignificant in view of his wide-ranging career. Between university and seminary, during the year l928-29, Gene Blake taught philosophy and religion at Forman Christian College in Lahore, India (now Pakistan).

In those days, and until WWII, the same kind of "short-term" missionary contract appealed to many young men and women of college and seminary age. Motives, as we now look more critically at the time, may have been mixed between a vague kind of Christian humanitarianism and a wistful idealism about bringing the benefits of modern civilization to backward peoples. But in Gene Blake's case, and doubtless for many others, it was also a matter of personal place and location.

Where one happens to be and where one ought to be imply both existential and geographical questions. To ask "where am I?" also requires some answer to the question "who am I?" For Gene Blake, the time and place interim between university and seminary corresponded with a wrestling of personal identity and professional vocation. It is a correlation at the heart of the Bible and in the faith and life of the Christian church, whether in theology, worship, personal experience, or social ethics.

I

In the Genesis creation story, after things happen simply because "God said let there be light … and it was so," we come upon the first confrontation between the Creator and the creature (Gen. 3:9). Hiding themselves, in more ways than one, the first man and woman hear the sound of "God walking in the garden in the cool of the day," only to be accosted by the provocative question, "Where are you?" Where, indeed!

It is the primordial and archetypal query repeated many times in many ways throughout the Scriptures. It is familiar to anyone confronted by the divine presence, whether in the cool of the evening or the heat of midday.

420 - Where Are You?

As Adam and Eve depart the Garden of Eden into the real world, it is a signal that henceforth homo viator will become the representative biblical figure. In both Old and New Testaments, the sense of mobility is inescapable. In endless procession, patriarchs, prophets, judges, kings, women and children, tribes, and nations move back and forth across the land and up and down in it. Abraham is not only the personification of faith in both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, but also the deracinated pilgrim who goes out at God's command to establish a covenant people. The faith of Abraham on the move finds a parallel in the faithfulness of Ruth the Moabitess, and the Exodus of a whole people under Moses corresponds to another national deliverance under Queen Esther in far-away Persia.

In the Gospels, Jesus comes into the world on the move, as Mary and Joseph stop en route from Nazareth to Bethlehem. It was to be a characteristic of the Christ life for, as he observed, "foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matt. 8:20). Jesus' ministry was mainly mission, as he travelled from place to place. As he came mobile into the world, so he left it, bearing the cross up the via dolorosa.

Jesus said of himself that he was "the way," and his followers became known derisively as those belonging to "the way" as they journeyed far and wide, turning "the world upside down." As such, they were like Abraham, "strangers and pilgrims on the earth" bound for "a better country."

The biblical testimony declares that when God comes near, calls us by our name, and asks us embarrassing questions about what we're doing and where we're going, the inevitable response involves uprooting and relocation. The conventional way of expressing this repositioning is, of course, in physical and geographical terms. But, as Bunyan's classic reminds us, the Christian pilgrimage is as much internal as external, and often more so.

II

Sometimes the answer to the question "Where are you?" must be answered "nowhere." We think immediately these days of the victims of AIDS and of Alzheimer's disease. But the "nowhere" category also includes patients in mental institutions, prisoners, the senile, the terminally ill, the severely retarded of all ages, addicts, derelicts, "bag women," drifters, youthful run-aways, the seriously depressed, psychotic and self-destructive people everywhere.

For all such, it would be cruel and unthinking to address the question "Where are you?" The same would be true for the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized and discriminated against all over the world. With all such in mind, the question "Where are you?" is addressed to us, not to them. And it demands concern and action to put pressure on medical research, hospitals, government agencies for health and welfare, and, perhaps especially, upon churches to reach out beyond where they are now.

421 - Where Are You?

During the '50s and '60s, the "nowhere" people also included a whole generation of "beat" youth who, in the title of Jack Kerouac's "bible," were "on the road" but going nowhere. "Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there." "Where we going, man?" "I don't know but we gotta go." About the same time, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot tantalized many with its timeless waiting, plotless drama, and non-sequitur monologues. Nothing happens because anything can happen on this empty road that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.

If the question "Where are you?" seemed meaningless to many the day before yesterday, there were others who experienced a radical dislocation of place and position. This was the time of the "freedom rides," as many marched to Selma with Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the time when women were awakened by Betty Friedan and walked out of the kitchen. This was the time of Kent State and student protest marches. This was the time of Rachel Carson's predictions about the environment as many later travelled to nuclear sites and contaminated wastelands. This was the time when Pope John XXIII, to everyone's surprise, opened the Vatican windows and set in motion a new kind of pilgrimage to Rome. And, just to add one more, this was the time when a Trappist monk journeyed East to explore an alien but congenial mystical experience.

III

Today we can pose the question "Where are you?" to three major areas of religious life: the current spiritual search for inner orientation, the present state of the church and the churches, and the direction of contemporary theology.

Many dismiss the inner quest for meaningful spiritual experience as a passing fad or an aberrant cop-out. Some examples of the current trend may seem remote and bizarre. But religious experience, prayer and contemplation, solitude and meditation are basic and necessary aspects of Christian faith. If they are ignored or left unnourished in our churches, seminaries, colleges, and universities, they will surely emerge elsewhere.

It has been suggested that many today who look inside and ask themselves "Where are you?" do so partly as an unconscious protest. Against what? Against a medical profession that has lost the personal touch, an industrial complex where the individual is lost in the corporation, an educational establishment more interested in research than the meaning of life, and a scientific technology that not only by-passes the person but imperils the human race.

Religious studies departments in our colleges and universities, for the most part, avoid courses in personal religious experience. Professional academic meetings such as the annual gathering of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature scarcely notice the repositioning that personal religious experience often entails.

As for the churches: twenty-five years ago and more, both Protestant and Catholic churches could give some confident answers to the question

422 - Where Are You?

"Where are you?" Among other things, they would have said they wanted to be somewhere else beyond the divisions that separated them, and that the prospects for a new ecumenicity, a fresh look at the Scriptures and tradition, and a creative approach to all segments of society looked promising.

Shortly before the death of Gene Blake, his predecessor as General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, W.A. Visser't Hooft, also died. Both names taken together symbolize the years of ecumenical groping, issuing in the Amsterdam Assembly of 1948. Fifteen years later, in 1963, Vatican Council II promised new and exciting approaches to both church and theology.

Today, it is not so clear where the WCC is going, or whether the Vatican windows are now being closed again. It may well be that the former geographical centers of power, Geneva and Rome, no longer command undisputed ecclesiastical suzerainty. The fastest growing and most vigorous emerging Christian churches are not to be found in the Old World or even the New World, but in the Third World. A radically provocative dislocation is going on whether stand-pat churches and mainline enominations know it or not.

If theology, as all the classic interpreters have insisted, is "church theology," then our current theological interests reflect in large measure where we think the church is situated today. If we are unsure where the church is, or should be, we will also be confused about the orientation of theology. Perhaps the best that can be said for much contemporary theologizing, and it is by no means a little thing, stems from our insistence that we are moving beyond where we were just recently. So, there is much talk about being "post"--post-modern, post-critical, and post-liberal. If theology is asked "Where are you?", it is at least something to be able to say that we are not there or here or another place any longer and are restless to be somewhere else.

IV

These queries about "Where are you?" are not meant to be querulous or contentious, but to suggest the kinds of issues in church and theology that need to be articulated for our day. In part, they grow out of discussions among members of our Editorial Council, a report of which is included in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY.

A current TV beer commercial, with a catchy tune and a wellgroomed and fast-moving group of young executive types in the background, carries the words: "You're on your way to the top, where you're going, you've always known it." Geared no doubt for the yuppie generation of eager self-achievers, the mood also finds sociological basis in some of the types interviewed in the much discussed Bellah volume, Habits of the Heart. If this is one answer to the question "Where are you?", let us hope today's church and theology can provide another.